How to disable maximizing the dialog from Task manager?

Its not mandatory for every windows citizen to have maximize button. 😀 For instance, Windows calculator. But do you know that via taskmgr we could maximize any dialogs? Even you can maximize the dialog which doesn’t have maximize style. Its a master piece of QA team to make the dialog look weired. Well how to prevent it?

You can do it by handling – WM_GETMINMAXINFO message. Before resizing, this message is fired to the dialog to get the minimum and maximum window dimensions. Since, we don’t need to change our dimensions, we have to set the max dimensions as current window dimension. Have a look at the code snippet.

// Message map
BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP(CRabbitDlg, CDialog)
    ...
    ON_WM_GETMINMAXINFO()
END_MESSAGE_MAP()

void CRabbitDlg::OnGetMinMaxInfo( MINMAXINFO FAR* pMinMaxInfo )
{
    // Window rect.
    RECT rect = { 0 };
    GetWindowRect( &rect );
    CRect WindowRect( &rect );

    // Set the maximum size. Used while maximizing.
    pMinMaxInfo->ptMaxSize.x = WindowRect.Width();
    pMinMaxInfo->ptMaxSize.y = WindowRect.Height();

    // Set the x,y position after maximized.
    pMinMaxInfo->ptMaxPosition.x = rect.left;
    pMinMaxInfo->ptMaxPosition.y = rect.top;
}

There is one small known issue – if we maximize via taskmgr, the window remains same, but the title bar will be painted like maximized.

Targeted Audience – Intermediate.